A wheel rite was in the library at the same time as a duke and happened to notice the duke’s selection of an ancient volume of knowledge from the sages. Before he could catch himself, he scoffed at the book. The duke was not impressed, but gave the wheel rite a chance to save his head with an explanation. The man respectfully explained,
“Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movement of my hand is neither gentle nor violent, the idea in my mind is realized. But, I cannot tell how to do this by word of mouth, there is a knack to it. I cannot teach it to my son not can my son learn it from me, and I am alive. Your sages are long dead.” (The Writings of Chuang Tzu pg 49)
It is only when the words fade that we can see the picture.
I recently read the four gospels of Jesus from start to finish and noticed something I had never noticed before: at least a third of Jesus’ teachings are against the religious people, maybe even more than a third.
What is more, Jesus doesn’t even try to convert the religious people. They are so stuck in their ways and tied to their words that they are not even worth the time.
Of course, religious people think those teachings aren’t for them and so, like me, breeze over the warnings and quickly lose themselves in their own personal understandings. On the other side, the undecided are scared away by the words and prefer to stick with the safe crowd and not throw their lot in the ring.
Some too violent, some too gentle.
It isn’t really our fault that this happens. Organizing and categorizing things is our brain’s way of making sense of an incredible amount of information, and words are our most useful categorization tool.
The thing we need to realize is the subliminal progression of words to labels to judgments.
My grade two teacher taught me something that somehow stuck in my head all these years. She was teaching the 10 commandments and said that worshiping an idol would even be if we had a picture of God in our heads as we prayed.
At the time I obviously didn’t understand why this would matter, but dutifully prayed to a blank space in my mind, often wondering if I would be in trouble for praying to the blank space.
Now I realize the danger in becoming attached to ideas that our minds naturally add to words. I often think about how the word god is actually just a noun because God knew that as soon as we put a name to something, we think we understand it, and when we think we understand something we get swept away in rights and wrongs.
A set of instructions will not only never be able to fully teach us, it can very easily cloud our judgement if we let it. Like the wheel rite we must constantly look for balance until the idea in our mind is realized.
If these posts challenge you to think, and if you know of someone else for whom they would do the same, please let them know. Thanks,
Greg
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